Your company has an open position. You have interviewed many people and had several rounds of vetting their skills. You think you are ready to make an offer to one of these candidates.

Stop and ask yourself: Does the person fit the job?

The only way to know for sure if the person fits the job is by conducting a job benchmark. I’ve heard other company’s state that they take their “best employees” in a role and then “benchmark these individuals” but that’s not benchmarking the job, that’s benchmarking a person. If you benchmark a person you don’t get the full view of what talent a job requires for superior performance. And that employee may not be a superior performer based on what the job needs.

Let me explain. In a job benchmark the key stakeholders and subject matter experts determine the behaviors, motivators, personal skills and task preferences required for superior performance for a specific role. This type of process makes it easy to remove common biases often associated with the hiring process. The factual data based on job requirements provides a solid foundation for hiring and coaching success.

Once your job benchmark is complete you’ll assess your potential candidates against the behaviors, motivators and personal skills of the job. You’ll be able to see where your candidates fit these objective hiring criteria, where they exceed and where they don’t match. At this point you’ll be making a conscious choice to continue with them in the process or bring them on board. If you hire them then you’ll know exactly what to expect day one when they step into the role.

You can even customize your on-boarding or staff orientation process for the individual to include specific e-learning, coaching or other training you want your new hire to work on throughout the year. This helps them beef up or close any competency gaps that were uncovered in the assessment phase of the hiring process.

I don’t know about you but if I had the opportunity to consciously and objectively know where someone matches the job I’m hiring for and where they fall short then I believe I will make a better hiring decision than if I used the halo affect or hope and pray method.